Local SEO

[bronxpad]

I get emails and calls from companies like Yext, Local, Merchant Circle and others claiming they can help with local search results.

Basically they help by making sure that the site is properly listed in all the directories and other sources.

They have a fee of around $100 per month.

Question is, can they really help and is it worth it.

Note, my site is already on page one albeit on the bottom.

[MoosaHemani]

If your Business is local then this is actually worth doing. If you will list yourself in local websites like Google Maps, Yelp, Super Pages and more.... and get some extra reviews then chances are you will be able to get leads from these areas.

[BedeFahey]

Hi Joel,

It depends on the company and what they're offering, and it's important to be crystal clear (get it in writing) about what they're doing.

Yext, for instance, is a pretty solid service for making sure your business is listed correctly in a large number of directories. But the price is something like $499/year, not $100/month.

I've never heard of Merchant Circle or Local.com offering to make sure you're listed properly in other directories. Is it possible that this is either:

A) A third party company offering to make sure you're listed correctly. Or;

B) Local.com or Merchant Circlet are trying to sell you an enhanced listing that will "help you show up better"

If it's the first case, I would be very wary of any of the companies that robocall or email you saying they can help. Most of the time, these organizations try to automate the process, and end up causing damage by creating duplicate listings, feeding incorrect information, or just generally being inept.. Local SEO help that actually makes a difference doesn't retail for $100 per month.

If it's the second case, I've never found these listings to be useful, except in very specific circumstances, most of which have to do with being in retail or the restaurant business. Even in these circumstances, an enhanced listing willnot improve the ranking of your site in the search engines. No matter what the sales guy says.

You say you're ranking on the first page. Are you ranking in the local results, or the organic results? There are definitely things that you can do help improve either - I'd highly recommend checking out http://getlisted.org/ (which SEOmoz recently acquired) for more information about local search.

If this isn't something you want to take on yourself, I'd do some research to find a company that focuses on Local SEO in your area. Ask for recommendations from local business owners. Or, you could check out some of the organizations that are members of SEOmoz.

In short, I would be very wary of anyone offering to help you out for $100/month. Best case scenario, you're probably purchasing an enhanced listing that won't help much. Worst case, you're working with a company that doesn't know what it's doing, tries to automate the process, and ends up messing up your listing data.

If you can provide more detail on what organizations are approaching you, and what they are saying exactly (feel free to copy and paste an email) then we can probably give you more specific guidance.

I hope this helps.

Best,

Bede

[bronxpad]

Thank you for your thorough response. So you believe Yext is a good service? What do they actually do?

[AWCthreads]

List your site in local directories as it is good practice and worth it.

Don't pay anyone to do it for you.

[BedeFahey]

You're very welcome.

I've used Yext for one customer, and spoken with their sales team a few times. They offer a service that allows you to update multiple listings from one location. I believe the count is at somewhere around 50. It's a semi-realtime interface, and I believe they hook in to the directories via API rather than a submission process.

I found them to be quite good in terms of making it a lot easier to update a number of directories at once with the same information. That's the biggest advantage - entering your business info in a single place. The biggest limitation I found was that some directories have different fields that you can fill out, and Yext doesn't seem to handle all of the variations. To me, that's fairly minor. Yext also won't hit the upstream data providers like Localeze, Axciom etc. so you'll still have to do those manually.

There's nothing wrong with doing it yourself. Just be careful to get all of the information correct. The biggest thing to be aware of is keeping your Name, Address, and Phone number consistent across all the different directories.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Joel, Bede has provided a terrific answer. I will only add that most Local SEOs I know agree that there is no replacement for manual citation building, because of the benefit of having total control over the whole process yourself. The main benefit of Yext is that they allow you to manage many citations in one place (a nice feature) but there have been some questions in the Local SEO community about the tool's ability to recognize problematic duplicate listings (see:http://www.ngsmarketing.com/why-yext-might-not-be-the-best-fit-for-your-business/) and as citation experts like Darren Shaw of Whitespark have proved, you can typically build many more citations than are covered by Yext's tool. Darren's tool is here: https://www.whitespark.ca/local-citation-finder/ If you don't want to go with doing it yourself or using an automated tool, the third alternative is to hire a citation builder. I believe both Nyagoslav Zhekov (NGSmarketing, linked to above) and Darren Shaw's company do this. Both gentlemen are highly regarded. So, that's a third option.